Why Afghans Dig Empire Graveyards

Why Afghans Dig Empire Graveyards

by

Nicolas JS Davies

Afghanistan is known as the
"graveyard of empires." But just why do empires keep sending thousands
of their young people to die in Afghanistan?

American
blood-letting in Afghanistan is generally explained in terms of the
Taliban and al-Qaeda, but it was the earlier U.S. involvement in
Afghanistan (in the 1980s) that led to the emergence of these movements
in the first place, not the other way around.

Since
Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has used al-Qaeda's terrorist
attacks to justify much more than simply retaliation for 9/11 or even
prevention of some future recurrence of 9/11. The attacks have served
as an excuse for U.S. invasions and occupations (including Iraq which
had nothing to do with 9/11), flagrant war crimes (including torture),
and the largest U.S. military budget since World War II.

To
accomplish this, the government has persuaded many Americans that their
country faces a unique and unprecedented threat that justifies these
extreme measures, not least the savage, eight-year war in Afghanistan.

A
Dutch friend of mine tried to have a rational conversation with an
American co-worker about 9/11 and the so-called "war on terror," and
was told, "You can't possibly understand. Your country has never been
attacked like this."

The puzzled Dutch woman had to ask, "Did you never hear anything about the Second World War?"

Of
course, it is precisely the far greater dangers that people in other
countries have faced in the past that enable them to put the threat of
terrorism in perspective. Paradoxically, it is the relative safety of
the United States that makes Americans so vulnerable to panic and
propaganda when faced with such a limited threat.

In
fact, the response of the U.S. government to the terrorist attacks has
been exactly as Osama bin Laden and his colleagues intended. They did
not expect to defeat the United States by knocking down a few
buildings. Nor were they motivated by some irrational hatred of
freedom.

Rather the attacks
were designed to provoke a reaction that would expose the hypocrisy of
the United States, laying bare the hard iron fist of militarism and
violence within the soft velvet glove of Hollywood and soda-pop.

The
explicit goal was to goad the American empire into using its vast
arsenal of destructive weapons in ways that would gradually undermine
its own economic and military power. Bin Laden and his
second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri understood so much better than
America's deluded leaders that this would be a war the United States
could not win.

But neither the
opportunism nor the hypocrisy of U.S. policy explain why American
soldiers are fighting, killing and dying in Afghanistan of all places.

While
Americans think of the war in terms of 9/11 and terrorism, Afghans are
not afflicted with such a myopic view. They see the war in the context
of a much longer history that is shaped by their country's mountainous
geography and strategic location between Iran to the west, Russia to
the north and India and Pakistan to the south and east - and of their
own ability to defend it against the world's greatest empires.

Or,
as noted in the resignation letter of Matthew Hoh, an American diplomat
who resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan last September: "I
have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white
banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign
soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.
The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes
to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency."

Unlike Destroyer

At first glance, Afghanistan seems an unlikely destroyer of empires.

My
friend Gregg spent seven years there in the 1970s, and he encountered
nothing but the legendary hospitality of the Pashtun tribes-people.
That's why he stayed for seven years. But then Gregg was a respectful
traveler fleeing the violence of his native Northern Ireland, not a
soldier in an occupying army.

Conventional military powers consistently underestimate the Afghans until they are over-committed and faced with humiliation.

The
first modern empire brought down by the Afghans was the 200-year-old
Safavid Empire of Persia. Local Pashtun tribes-people rose up in
rebellion under Mirwais Khan Hotak in 1706 and expelled Persia from
Western Afghanistan.

Mirwais's
son, Mir Mahmud Hotaki, continued the war and sacked the splendid
Persian capital of Isfahan in 1722. The Safavid dynasty was already
economically weak, as Dutch merchant ships were sailing away with the
bulk of regional trade from its formerly lucrative trade-routes. But
the Afghans delivered the coup de grace.

In
the early 19th century, as the Russian Empire expanded in the Caucasus
and Central Asia, a weakened Persia gradually lost territory. The
British came to see Persia as a Russian puppet and adopted a "forward
policy," to keep Afghanistan as a buffer between British India and the
expanding Russian Empire.

This
effectively made Herat in Western Afghanistan the new outer frontier of
the British Empire that Britain was committed to keeping out of the
hands of Russia and Persia.

A
Persian army besieged Herat for 280 days in 1837-1838. The failure of
the siege exposed the weakness of Persia, which continued to
disintegrate. But it also highlighted the vulnerability of Afghanistan,
which was ruled at the time by different tribal leaders in Herat,
Kandahar and Kabul, following the collapse of the Durrani dynasty.

So
the British and their Sikh allies from the Punjab marched into
Afghanistan to restore the former Amir of Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, who
had been deposed and exiled in 1809.

This
was the so-called First Afghan War. In a parallel with the present
crisis, the British plan was to stay only as long as necessary to leave
Shah Shuja in firm control of the country, but this proved to be
impossible. He effectively ruled only Kabul, where he owed his position
to the presence of British and Indian troops and officials.

The longer the British stayed the more they alienated the Afghans.

British
officials brought their families to Kabul and established a small
colony, complete with soirees and cricket matches. Their expenditures
caused runaway inflation, which alienated the merchant class of Kabul,
and a riot in Kabul in November 1841 soon grew into a full-blown
rebellion against British occupation.

Mohammed
Akbar Khan, the son of Dost Mohammed, the leader the British had
deposed in Kabul, came down from the mountains to lead the rebellion.

The
Afghans killed the British commander General MacNaghten, dragged his
body through the streets of Kabul and put it on display it in the
bazaar. His deputy General Elphinstone negotiated with Akbar Khan for
safe passage to Jalalabad for occupation officials and their families.

Death Trap

Seven
hundred British troops, 3,800 Indian troops and 12,000 civilians set
out for Jalajabad, 90 miles away, on Jan. 6, 1842. At every pass
through the mountains they were greeted by Afghan tribesmen waiting in
ambush. They were all massacred or they froze to death long before they
could reach Jalalabad.

The
sole survivor, assistant surgeon William Brydon, rode into Jalalabad
with a piece of his skull sheared off by a sword after being rescued by
an Afghan shepherd. Asked for news of the British army from Kabul, he
replied "I am the army".

The
British sent another expedition to rescue some prisoners and take
revenge on the people of Kabul, but they abandoned the effort to occupy
or control Afghanistan. The Afghans had established their independence,
and neither Britain, Russia nor Persia occupied Afghan territory for
the next 36 years.

Mohammed
Akbar Khan died, but Dost Mohammed and his other sons united
Afghanistan and established mutually respectful relations with the
British. Ironically, a truly independent Afghanistan served as a very
effective buffer between the British and Russian Empires, and the
British helped the Afghans to repel more Persian attacks on Herat in
1852 and 1856.

The Second
Afghan war began after Sher Ali Khan, Dost Mohammed's third son,
accepted a Russian diplomatic mission to Kabul in 1878 but then
rebuffed a British one. This resurrected the recurring specter of
British insecurity over Afghanistan.

Britain
invaded again and occupied much of the country. Sher Ali died in
February 1879 and the British persuaded his son Mohammad Yaqub Khan to
sign the Treaty of Gandamak, which ceded Quetta and the Khyber Pass to
Britain and gave Britain control over Afghan foreign policy in exchange
for financial support.

The
British army withdrew, but it left behind a diplomatic mission in
Kabul. A few months later, the remaining British officials were all
killed during a local rebellion.

The
British invaded again. After 10 months of savage fighting, they
defeated an Afghan army under Yaqub's brother Ayub Khan at Kandahar.
The British finally withdrew, but this time they did not leave a
diplomatic mission behind in Kabul to be killed!

Afghanistan
became fully independent from Britain as a result of the Third Afghan
War in 1919, which was an Afghan invasion of the North West Frontier
province of British India.

Existential Concerns

Throughout
the 20th century, Afghanistan's people confronted the same existential
questions as people in other non-Western countries. What aspects of
modern Western technology and culture could they adopt without losing
what they valued in their own way of life?

As elsewhere, different classes within Afghan society answered this
question according to their own interests, and the resulting divisions
left Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunistic exploitation and
intervention by foreign powers, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the
Soviet Union and the United States.

Amanullah
Khan, the King of Afghanistan who won independence from Britain in
1919, admired the modernist regime of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. He
mandated compulsory elementary education, opened co-educational schools
and formally abolished the burqa for women. But conservative tribal and
religious leaders rebelled, and forced him to abdicate in 1929.

The
last King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, ruled for 40 years (1933-1973) by
pursuing a more gradual approach to modernization.

Afghanistan
was still in the same position geographically, but the world around it
had changed. Instead of being sandwiched between the Russian and
British Empires, it was now wedged between the Soviet Union and
independent Pakistan.

Mohammed
Daoud Khan, the King's cousin, was his prime minister from 1953 until
1963. Daoud envisioned a reunification of the Pashtun territories on
either side of the British colonial border between Afghanistan and
Pakistan.

After this
initiative was rebuffed by Pakistan, Daoud increasingly turned
northward to the U.S.S.R. for both military and development aid.

In
1973, Daoud seized power from his cousin, but, instead of declaring
himself King, he abolished the monarchy and became Afghanistan's first
President. He began by renewing Afghanistan's relationship with the
U.S.S.R. and used Soviet aid to build up the Afghan army.

But
he soon broke with his Marxist allies in the Peoples Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA), distanced Afghanistan from the Soviet Union, and
began to improve relations with Pakistan, Egypt and other
Western-oriented Muslim countries.

In
1978, a leading PDPA politician was murdered, leading the other PDPA
leaders to believe that Daoud was planning to have them all killed.
They staged a coup, killed Daoud and his family and formed the new
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Anehita Ratebzad, a female member of the Revolutionary Council, wrote in a New Kabul Times
editorial, "Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal
education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a
healthy generation for building the future of the country ... Educating
and enlightening women is now the subject of close government
attention."

The U.S.S.R.
quickly provided $1.2 billion to build roads, schools, hospitals and
wells. The relatively small urban population welcomed the reforms and
new development, but the interests of rural landowners and tribal and
religious leaders were seriously threatened and they began to fund and
support mujahedeen to commit terrorism and resist government forces.

A New Great Game

Seeing
Afghanistan as a new front in the Cold War, the U.S., Pakistani and
Saudi governments began to provide funds, training and weapons to the mujahedeen. A new version of the "great game" was under way.

For
the Soviets, Afghanistan had lost none of its value since the 19th
century. Their empire extended from Europe to Siberia, but nowhere did
it reach southward to warm-water ports and the sea-routes to South Asia
and Africa.

The United States
now controlled those sea-lanes and had the same interest as Britain in
the 19th century in keeping a buffer between the Russians and the ports
of Pakistan. The establishment of a Soviet client state in Afghanistan
offered the U.S.S.R. the tantalizing promise of fulfilling historic
ambitions.

In funding, supplying, supporting and training the mujahedeen, U.S. policy-makers believed they had found a low-cost means to neutralize a serious geostrategic challenge.

U.S.
President Jimmy Carter and his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev began
this new "great game" as a proxy war, to be fought mainly by Afghans
against other Afghans. But the conflict escalated dramatically after
Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981.

Before
withdrawing in 1989, Soviet forces lost 13,000 lives, while Afghan dead
were estimated at about one million. Even after the Soviet departure,
both Moscow and Washington continued supplying their client Afghan
armies. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Why Afghanistan Really Fell Apart."]

During
the period, both the United States and the Soviet Union became engaged
in Afghanistan because they had important strategic interests at stake,
long before the emergence of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
Since the end of the Cold War, the two main thrusts of U.S. foreign
policy have been to impose military control over every part of the
world where oil is produced or shipped; and to encircle Russia with a
ring of U.S. allies and military bases from Poland to Georgia to
Central Asia.

Afghanistan's
position between Iran, Central Asia and Pakistan makes it a critical
part of the pipeline map, potentially supplying Pakistan and India with
oil and gas from Western operations in the Caspian Sea via the
projected Unocal (now Chevron) pipeline through Afghanistan.

A
strategically-located Afghanistan - allied with the United States and
permitting American bases - would add an important link in the military
encirclement of Russia, China and Iran.

On
the other hand, if Afghanistan were aligned with Russia, it could
equally well serve as a route for a pipeline to transport Russian oil
and gas to Pakistan and beyond, and place Russian military or
intelligence bases on the borders of Pakistan and Iran.

The
U.S. interest in denying the Russians a pipeline route to the Arabian
Sea and a client state on the border of Pakistan corresponds closely to
Britain's fears of Russian expansion into Afghanistan in the 19th
century.

Equally frightening
from a U.S. point of view, even an independent Afghanistan that was
free from U.S. or Russian influence could link Iran to China via yet
another pipeline route.

Fear of Russia

It
was fear of Russian ambitions that led Britain to keep intervening in
Afghanistan in the 19th century, more than any ambitions of its own to
rule this unconquerable country.

The
United States is now reluctant to withdraw from Afghanistan because of
similar fears, that Russia and/or Iran will move in to fill the vacuum,
consolidating their dominant roles in the region, gaining
extraordinarily valuable strategic and commercial assets and excluding
U.S. interests.

But as in the
mid-19th century, a genuinely independent Afghanistan could actually be
a stable and effective buffer between the great powers.

As
the Maliki government in Iraq has gradually slipped the American leash,
it has awarded oil contracts to Russian, Chinese and South Korean
companies as well as to Western ones, and a future Afghan government
could ultimately do likewise, playing suitors for pipeline deals off
against each other in the traditional fashion.

In
Iraq, Western oil companies have welcomed partnerships with Asian
companies that can supply cheaper labor and equipment and are not
tainted by a role in the invasion and destruction of the country.

In
fact, as commerce of all kinds has begun to flow again in Iraq, the
United States has been delivered a powerful message that aggression and
military occupation do not pay.

Total
Iraqi imports grew from $25.7 billion in 2007 to $43.5 billion in 2008.
But even as other countries' trade with Iraq has grown, exports from
the United States to Iraq have remained flat at a meager $2 billion per
year, most of that stemming from existing contracts with the
U.S.-backed government.

By
contrast, Turkey, which refused to support the U.S. invasion, has
become one of Iraq's largest trading partners, with exports of $10
billion to Iraq in 2008. At a recent trade fair in Baghdad, an Iraqi
executive explained that his construction company preferred to do
business with Turkish firms because costs were lower and the Turks "are
not an occupier."

Other
countries that opposed the invasion, in particular Iran, France and
Brazil, have likewise become major trading partners. On condition of
anonymity, a European ambassador to Baghdad told the New York Times that his country's business relations with Iraq improved greatly once it withdrew its troops.

"Being
considered an occupier handicapped us extremely," he said. "The farther
we are away from that, the more our companies can be accepted on their
own merits."

In some of the
largest government contracts awarded since the invasion, the Iraqi
transportation ministry recently awarded $30 billion to rebuild Iraq's
railroads to a combination of British, Italian and Czech companies. And
the Russian company RusAir has won an exclusive air cargo contract that
has forced FedEx to terminate its operations in Iraq.

The Afghan Dilemma

As
in other parts of the world, the U.S. effort to control events by the
threat and use of military force is the central obstacle to a peaceful
resolution for Afghanistan. The resurgence of the Taliban and other
fighting forces in Afghanistan since 2006 can be directly traced to a
massive escalation of U.S. air-strikes that year, even as numbers of
U.S. casualties remained flat.

Only
98 American troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, one less than
the 99 killed in 2005. And yet the number of air-strikes exploded from
176 in 2005 to 1,770 in 2006, a ten-fold increase.

The
flat casualty figures make it clear that this was an escalation
initiated by U.S. forces, not by the Afghan resistance. The year 2007
saw a further escalation to 2,926 air-strikes.

The
successful response of the Afghan resistance to the American escalation
was entirely predictable, but it appears to have surprised U.S.
planners.

As in Iraq, the
U.S. reacted to the failure of its puppet government to establish any
legitimacy or control over most of the country with a massive
escalation of military force, launching a desperate and bloody campaign
to bomb and terrorize the population into submission.

This brutal escalation was an abysmal failure, leading directly to the brink of defeat, where U.S. forces now find themselves.

The
so-called "surge" in Iraq provided cover for a similar escalation of
aerial bombardment, from 229 air-strikes in 2006 to 1,119 in 2007, and
110 per month through most of 2008.

In
Afghanistan as in Iraq (and Vietnam), despite endless lip-service to
phrases like "winning hearts and minds" and "clear, hold and build,"
American military strategists cling to the core belief that their
virtually unlimited capacity for violence can ultimately carry the day
if enough legal and political constraints are removed.

Instead,
the failures of U.S. military force and the success of "Anti-Coalition
Forces" everywhere have confirmed Richard Barnet's Vietnam-era judgment
that, "at the very moment the number one nation has perfected the
science of killing, it has become an impractical instrument of
political domination."

The
United States military budget is higher than at any time since the
Second World War because U.S. officials now regard more of the world as
critical to U.S. interests than ever before and are determined to
militarily control all of it.

Fortunately
for people everywhere, this policy, if it even deserves to be called
one, is neither realistic nor economically sustainable. But the whole
world faces a critical period of transition as the U.S.
military-industrial complex wrestles with the impossible challenge of
an unconquerable world, experimenting with new weapons and strategies
at the expense of countless lives and squandering resources that could
otherwise be used to solve real problems.

Gabriel
Kolko has been writing for decades about the failure of U.S. foreign
policy to define its interests in a way that leads to achievable or
manageable goals. Instead of defining and prioritizing its interests
like any other country, the United States wreaks havoc in international
affairs by clinging to virtually unlimited ambitions that it pursues on
an opportunistic basis, with no regard for the impact on billions of
human beings or the future of the world.

This
has resulted in gigantic military budgets and a long series of
unwinnable wars that the United States should never have embarked on,
even from the amoral "realist" point of view that its deluded
strategists aspire to.

Collapsing Empires

Afghans
believe that it was they who brought down the Safavids and the Soviets.
While the Afghans definitely did their part, the forces that led to the
collapse of those empires were really much closer to home in both cases.

The
real graveyard of the Soviet empire lay in the Kremlin, where absolute
power insulated its leaders from the forces at work in the real world
beyond its walls. The Afghan war was only one of many causes of
discontent and dissolution within the Soviet political and economic
system.

A quiet underground
movement of non-violent popular opposition grew steadily beneath the
surface until, in defiance of all conventional wisdom, it burst through
into the light of day and the U.S.S.R. was quite suddenly dissolved.
The American people now face a similar crisis. It should be no surprise
that a predatory political and economic system that won't provide
healthcare, public services or economic opportunity to its own people
is also resorting to war and militarism in a desperate effort to feed
its insatiable appetite for growth and profit.

Since
the 1970s, America's leaders have consolidated their political and
economic power into effective monopolies. Most industries are dominated
by two or three huge firms, and the political system is controlled by a
similar duopoly.

Research on
economic competition has established that such near-monopolies take on
many of the characteristics of actual monopolies, stifling innovation
and competition, destroying smaller businesses, exploiting employees,
building inefficient bureaucracies and spending more on marketing than
on research and development.

The
U.S. health insurance industry employs 30 times as many administrative
staff as it did in 1970. American firms spend $290 billion per year on
advertising, almost $1,000 for every person in the country.

And
corporate control of politics has systematically dismantled every
mechanism that could restore effective management or halt the system's
relentless drive to devour everything including itself. Looking for
solutions from any of the leaders promoted by such a dysfunctional
system is pure folly.

However,
by learning from the example of popular movements in other countries
throughout history, ordinary people in the United States can organize
politically to elect very different people to public office and to
stimulate mass public opposition to war, militarism and corporate
politics.

It is the policy of
the United States, not that of Afghanistan, that is filling the
graveyards, and the great game that can stop the funerals will not be
played out in Afghanistan but in Washington and in local communities
all over the United States as Americans begin to organize for a
post-imperial, post-corporate and more democratic future.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood on Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq,
due out in March 2010 from Nimble Books. He is also the local
coordinator of Progressive Democrats of America (www.pdamerica.org) in
Miami.

Further

Lord, what would John Lennon have made of the Trump monster? Marking Thursday's 36th anniversary of Lennon's murder, Yoko Ono posted a plea for gun control, calling his death "a hollowing experience" and pleading, "Together, let's bring back America, the green land of Peace." With so many seeking solace in these ugly times, mourns one fan, "Oh John, you really should be here." Lennon conceded then, and likely would now, "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."